In this day and age, tendencies go towards reducing consumption of paper and other non-reusable materials in order to transmit information. Emails, automatic teller machines (ATMs), and online shopping are just a few examples that demonstrate this. However, certain media are not as easily digitized with a sufficiently acceptable degree of quality.
Photographs are found among these media. While digital cameras are becoming more and more popular, they currently have spatial resolutions of about 1 to 2 Mega Pixels/cm2, which is by far inferior to conventional cameras with photosensitive chemical film (an ISO 100 film corresponds to about 40 Mega Pixels/cm2). This forces professional photographers, and others, to use the traditional cameras and deal with the ensuing inconveniences, such as waiting to develop the films, toxic acid baths, post-digitization using scanners, etc. In addition, within the family of digital imaging devices, the camera is the one that is farthest behind with respect to resolution. In comparison, scanners can have a resolution of 4800×9600 dpi (dot per inch) and printers can reach 4800×2400 dpi, and this on a surface that is 21.6×27.9 cm (8.5 inches×11 inches). These resolutions are about 4500 times higher than that of an image coming from the best digital cameras and scaled to a comparable surface (50×50 dpi).
Therefore, there is a need to improve the resolution available for digital cameras in order to continue in the direction that technology is currently taking us.